Back in the Game After Cancer

The diagnosis was grim. Two athletic young women could lose their legs. Read about how bionic bones gave them back their lives.

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A Lot in Common

Emily Land and Ashley Garrett never knew each other growing up, but they have a lot in common. For one thing, they lived just four miles apart, in Collierville, Tennessee, a suburb of 47,000, complete with a Target, Chick-fil-A and eight public schools. Both love sports: Emily, 24, was a Division 1 soccer player, and 15-year-old Ashley, an accomplished gymnast and cheerleader. Each is a long-haired, fresh-faced beauty with impeccable Southern manners. And then there are the scars, long and deliberate, snaking down each young woman’s athletic left leg. The marks are so striking that when Emily wears a skirt out to dinner with her husband, Chris, or Ashley attends a high school basketball game in her cheerleading uniform, strangers often ask, “What happened to your leg?”

“Shark attack,” Emily sometimes answers. “But you ought to see the shark!” This isn’t what really happened—to either Emily or Ashley. For those who are genuinely concerned, Emily might fess up and say, “I had cancer.” If she thinks her story could help someone else, she may reveal how a bone-eating tumor forced doctors to remove half her thighbone and replace it with a revolutionary metal implant that functions like real bone. Thanks to the implant, Emily’s left leg can move just like the other.

Emily was a college sophomore when she found her tumor, in April 2003, and started chemotherapy, followed by the surgery and more chemo, at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. Ashley was only ten, in August 2002, when St. Jude doctors replaced her diseased shinbone with an artificial one. As extraordinary as these state-of-the-art limb-sparing technologies are, perhaps the most remarkable thing is that, except for the young women’s scars, no one watching as they walk or climb stairs would ever guess their secret.

Decades ago, a diagnosis of osteosarcoma meant amputation and often death. After doctors removed the diseased limb, patients were sent home with a 20 percent chance of surviving five years. The development of chemo in the 1970s markedly improved survival rates. Because of huge advances in research and treatment of pediatric cancers at centers such as St. Jude, the chances of a child’s beating the disease are now 75 percent over five years. And high-tech bone replacements like Emily’s and Ashley’s are improving mobility for survivors.

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After shopping for weeks, I finally found the car of my dreams. It was only two years old and in beautiful condition. The salesman asked if I would like to take it for a test drive. We had traveled no more than two miles when the car broke down. The salesman called for a tow truck.

When it arrived, we climbed into the front seat. While the driver was hooking up the car, the salesman turned to me with a smile and said, "Well, now, what is it going to take to put you behind the wheel of that beauty today?"

-- Jan Baird